High-Speed Blend: Record Sales Force Vitamix To Switch Gears

You may have never heard of Vitamix, but to smoothie-drinking consumers, it’s the star in the firmament of food blenders. In April 2014, when the 95-year old family-run business promoted its flagship product on QVC, however, the explosive volume of orders and requests for its products at retail nearly crippled the business.

The company had been enjoying significant growth since 2010, thanks to a loyal and growing population of health-conscious foodies, including a number of acolytes who became YouTube celebrities, allowing Vitamix to move more aggressively into retail sales. Previously selling only direct to consumers through catalogs and tables at housewares trade shows, the company now had to keep up with orders numbering in the thousands of units, versus fulfilling single-unit orders.

Image courtesy Vitamix.

The recent QVC promotion, however, pushed the company’s website and call center operations over the brink, paralyzing operations for hours. “It became clear that we weren’t going to survive on the platforms we had,” says Mark Grebey, web platform manager at Vitamix.

On the heels of this event and others that followed, Tony Ciepiel, the company’s chief operating officer, led Vitamix through a "Blueprint for Transformation" restructuring initiative that called for a new business strategy and IT foundation that could support its growing online, catalog, and wholesale businesses.

In June 2014, Vitamix selected Oracle Commerce as its new global web commerce platform to serve as the backbone of its growing online business. But before making the transition, “We were hanging on by a thread,” reflects Grebey. To prevent Vitamix.com from crashing, “we had to closely monitor the old platform and cache our entire catalog every time we added a new product.”

Grebey’s team phased content into the new platform by configuring its server to support dual content management—an approach that allowed them to transfer data out of the old platform and simultaneously create new features in the new one. But about three months into the migration, “We stopped introducing new changes,” says Grebey. Instead, his team spent the next six months transferring data, moving security certificates and redirecting URLs. To make sure the new platform was stable, Grebey’s team rolled out its international sites first, and then two weeks later, cut over to the US.

By the end of March 2015, Vitamix had shut down its entire commerce infrastructure and replaced its original web platform with Oracle Commerce.

According to Grebey, using Oracle Commerce as its global web platform has allowed Vitamix to:

1. Stabilize the shopping experience. High-volume traffic would on some days overwhelm the system and force it to shut down—what the company refers to as “stability events.” “We were literally turning money away on the old platform,” says Holly Hacker, director of direct sales and customer experience at Vitamix.

Since the company went live with Oracle Commerce, there hasn’t been a single stability event, which Hacker predicted would itself improve sales by at least 10%. “And I’ll be darned if that didn’t exactly happen,” says Hacker.

2. Position more relevant products. Oracle Commerce allows the company’s merchandisers to configure "boost/bury" product placements that list certain products at the top of a consumer’s search results or bury them at the bottom—depending on existing inventory, planned promotions, and seasonal events.

“With the new platform’s cross-selling recommendation engine, we are seeing more customers ‘trading up’ for higher-value products than they were before,” says Hacker.

But Vitamix also needed a tool that supported post-sales activities. And the company’s Recipe Center is where it focused. As the most highly visited area of its website, “We wanted to make it easier for customers to search for recipes and discover new ways to use their equipment.”

3. Accelerate global expansion. “When I first joined Vitamix, we were trying to launch a presence in the UK. Using the old platform, the UK site took us over a year to develop and multiple failed implementation attempts before we got it done,” says Grebey. With the Oracle Commerce platform’s built-in multisite, multilanguage and multicurrency framework, Grebey says, “IT is no longer the critical path. The technology enables us to spin off commerce sites within weeks, allowing our business users to focus on delivering a localized experience."

4. Configure payment plans. With its products at the very top of the blender price point strata, Vitamix knew it needed to offer flexible payment terms to accommodate a broader range of customer budgets. However, “Our old platform required a major code push to modify the payment interface,” says Hacker.

Oracle Commerce allows Vitamix merchandisers and sales people to customize the payment interface themselves, adjusting terms for different customers, promotions, and events. Since going live with the new payment plan features, not only have cart abandonment rates dropped by more than 10%, online sales have risen by 30%, and average order sizes have increased by 40%.

The next step for Vitamix is to use the new platform to tell the kinds of stories and descriptions that communicate why Vitamix blenders are worth what they cost. “We aren’t just selling a product,” says Hacker. “We’re changing people’s lives.”